Prospective purchasers will have to wait until April before they can attempt to secure the tickets, giving Locog's sponsor Ticketmaster time to strengthen the website.

A Locog spokesman said just 7,000 tickets were offered up for sale by ticketholders who no longer wanted them. This created an acute supply and demand issues, which led to the site having to be suspended.

"There were 250,000 people on the website chasing just two or four tickets and that level of demand created the issues that occurred, " a Locog spokesman said.

With the ticket resale website issues still not fully resolved, Locog will release the returned tickets along with the next tranche of around 1.3 million tickets across all sports and the opening and closing ceremonies in April.

This next selection of tickets will comprise highly sought after seats to popular sports like athletics, which have been freed up following confirmation of venue seating plans and will be available on a first-come first-served basis.

However, the sale of these tickets is likely to be staggered over several weeks to try and avoid the ticketing system crashing again.

Locog said the resale site will also be up and running in April to provide a secure and legal way of selling on unwanted tickets at face value.

However, when the resale site is eventually relaunched there will be a time lag between people offering their tickets and when they will go "live" for sale.

Locog commercial director Chris Townsend apologised to the public for the ticketing confusion.

"We are sorry for any inconvenience caused by the suspension of our ticketing resale platform," he said.

"We made a commitment to our customers to give them a safe, secure and legal way of selling Olympic and Paralympic tickets which they are no longer able to use.

"Every ticket we purchase from the public will be offered back to the public from April. We believe this system – purchasing the tickets back from customers now, and offering them again from April, will result in a better customer experience for everyone."